


of person vs. persona

by plinys



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Amnesia, F/M, Suicidal Thoughts, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, dark themes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-25
Updated: 2017-05-25
Packaged: 2018-11-04 21:47:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,708
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10999644
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/plinys/pseuds/plinys
Summary: A week of being trapped here as their prisoner and he knows exactly how these interactions will go down. She comes to visit, begs him to be the man who died when Leopold crossed into this world, struggles not to cry when he reminds her that he feels nothing for her.Repeat ad nauseam.(Or - Project: Looking Glass succeeded in bringing Framework Fitz into the real world.)





	of person vs. persona

**Author's Note:**

> me, on twitter: what if i wrote a angsty fs au where framework fitz came back instead of the real one and it was super angsty  
> most everyone: jess no  
> one friend: jess yes
> 
> (this is the product of that)
> 
> (slight warning for framework fitz being his little bitch self and references to the canon framework fraida relationship)

He’s not familiar with this base.  If he were, he would not still be trapped here. 

There are some notable differences between this world and his own. Ones that Leopold can categorize from even within his prison cell, comparing it to the accounts Ophelia had given him of her time here as a prisoner. 

It is at least something to keep his mind busy. 

They are more technologically advanced. His cell with its transparent wall holding him back, all of it controlled by a glorified data pad he has seen his visitors use on occasion. While medical procedures and body scans can all be made from the comfort of his cell without any actual human contact. 

The scientist in him admires this.

The prisoner does not. 

He has been stripped of his suits, of his comfort, a side effect of transporting his conscious into the version of him that had existed on this earth. Apparently this earth’s Leopold Fitz had lacked any semblance of fashion sense. The loose grey t-shirt and pants do not offer him the comfort he would have gained from being put together. Nor does his hair, loose over his face, falling from its usual style such that he has to constantly run his hand through it to keep it out of his field of vision. 

An inconvenience.

Being a prisoner is an inconvenience. 

If this was this was in his world. If he was the interrogator rather than the prisoner, there would not be so much down time. So much lingering here in a empty cell with time to think. It would be pointed torture with a purpose. Pain with the intention of extracting information, not endless waiting and carefully measured conversations beyond the comfort of an invisible wall. 

Hydra always acted with a purpose.

Whereas SHIELD leaves much to be desired. 

SHIELD won in this world. 

Something, which while Leopold knows in theory to be true, he can see the effects around him, and yet he still cannot seem to wrap his mind around. SHIELD had been weak and inefficient, unable to protect the citizens of the world on his earth. A necessary stepping stone. How had this earth been any different?

To think that not only SHIELD had won, but in this earth there was a version of him that was loyal to SHIELD, was laughable. 

Alistair Fitz would have never allowed his son to become an Agent of SHIELD, not with how deep Hydra had ran through their lineage. 

More than that, was the fact that these people seemed to actually care about him. 

Not  _ him  _ him, not Leopold, but the notion of whoever had lived on this earth before him. The body he now inhabited. The foolish man who had been loyal to SHIELD and had died without ever knowing why. 

They cared about him. 

Enough to stand there on the other side of the transparent border and watch Leopold for days on end.

“Ah hello, come to entertain me with your delusions again?”

 

*

 

A thought constantly plagues him:  _ What would father think if he could see me now? _

Though the thought is a bitter painful one, because his father is dead, killed by the woman who comes down daily to  _ interrogate _ him. He can still hear his father’s last words, the phone pressed to his ear, the ringing sound of a gun going off.

“If it isn’t the bitch who killed my father,” he greets her, pushing his pain down into anger as he glares at her on the other side of the room. “I almost missed you.” 

She flinches back at his words. 

A minor success. 

He has learned how to hurt her. 

A week of being trapped here as their prisoner and he knows exactly how these interactions will go down. She comes to visit, begs him to be the man who died when Leopold crossed into this world, struggles not to cry when he reminds her that he feels nothing for her.  

Repeat ad nauseam. 

He counts the days by when she comes to visit, the one constant that seems to exist on this earth.

Technically, he knows her name. 

_ Jemma Simmons _ . 

She’s said it to him multiple times as if hoping he would remember something as if saying her name and insisting that they love each other would make him turn back into the man that had existed in her world. It’s foolish. 

He pointedly refuses to refer to her by name. 

A mocking  _ Agent  _ suits his purpose occasionally. 

_ That bitch that killed my father  _ works just as well. 

“I should have killed you when I had the chance,” he says, almost casually, making himself sound bored even though this is the most ‘exciting’ part of his day. 

This time she does not flinch, she steadies her face, grips the tablet in her hand just a little bit tighter. 

“I know you’re in there, Fitz-”

“It’s  _ Doctor  _ Fitz,” he snaps, because he at least deserves that much. 

She meets his gaze, steady but watery, just another push and he’d be able to topple her over into the the sobbing state. 

Disappointing. 

Weak. 

How could any version of him have ever loved a woman so weak?

Despite the water in her eyes, her voice does not break when she speaks, “I’ll call you Doctor when you call me Jemma.” 

He makes his eye roll as obvious as possible. “On second thought, Fitz is fine.”

 

*

 

He remembers Ophelia’s stories about this world, about how she was held prisoner here, treated as less than human as a  _ thing _ , only taken out of her prison when it was useful to them. 

When she came back to him, back from the other side, it was like she’d hadn’t been put together right. 

She was never very warm, never good at expressing her emotions or thoughts, but when she came  _ back  _ it was different. Colder, but also stronger like her bones had been rebuilt with steel. 

She fell from twenty stories and survived and he knows that that had something to do with whatever happened to her when she was trapped in this world. 

It was just that she had never said what. 

They’d talked about this world as an abstract concept, a horror filled nightmares, where SHIELD won and was worse than anything Hydra had ever been. He never understood why she wanted to come here, to some place she called so horrible. 

Now he was stuck here, in the exact horror story Ophelia had described to him and it wasn’t - 

“I just want to go back to my earth,” Leopold tells her,  _ Jemma Simmons _ , come for her daily attempt to ‘jog his memory’. 

She’d been telling him some story about this earth’s version of him, some tale from the academy that sounds too similar to a memory of him and Ophelia for Leopold to be comfortable. Though she stops telling that story now as he speaks, looking at him with confusion more than anything else. “What?”

Leopold snorts. “Are you deaf now as well as dumb?” 

Another little flinch. 

Barely even a point in his favor. 

So easy, so predictable. 

Normally, he’d push that, but there’s something on his mind, and making her cry will only end their meeting. 

“I want to go back to my home,” Leopold says again. “I never wanted to come here, to this earth. Ophelia was the one obsessed with crossing into another earth, with taking revenge for when you people held her prisoner. I only went along with it because she wanted to so badly, and well, I suppose love makes you do crazy things.” He gives her a little half smirk. “You would know about that wouldn’t you?” 

He wonders which part of her will win out: the woman searching for the man she loves, or the SHIELD agent being presented the perfect opportunity for information.

Maybe this was their interrogation plan all along? 

Bore him nearly to death so he tells them about his earth. 

The agent wins for a brief moment, as she asks, “How do you imagine us doing that?”

“You and the subversive, who took over Agent Skye’s body crossed over easily enough. Surely, you know how to send me back?” 

“Fitz, I can’t-”

He cuts her off. “Tell your whoever is in change, that I’ll give him whatever information on my earth that he wants, if he sends Ophelia and I back afterwards.” 

“You can’t go back,” she says, suddenly, sounding almost sorry about it. “Your world isn’t real.” 

This isn’t the first time someone has tried to say that. 

It’s a lie. 

One spread by simple minded people. 

Fools who believe their earth to be the only one in the whole of existence. 

He’d expected her to be smarter than that. 

“Maybe if you send me back the person you're waiting for will appear,” he offers her, almost certain that it won’t work, “Or maybe he’s already dead.” 

Any chance he had of getting more information out of her is shut down in an instant, the sort of choked off gasping noise she makes it more disappointing than anything else. 

“Fitz isn’t dead,” she insists, “The man I love is in there somewhere. Just you wait, we’re going to find a way to get you back.”

Pathetic.

Pathetic. 

Pathetic. 

“The man you love has been dead for weeks.” 

 

*

 

They send this earth’s version of Agent May to see him next. If he’s disappointed that it isn’t Simmons again, he refuses to admit it even it even to himself, instead he just gives her this dismissive look.

“Ah the traitorous bitch come to see me again.” 

“Your nicknames need improvement,” says the second agent, Phil Coulson.

A nothing on Leopold’s earth, but here apparently someone important enough that everyone deferred to him. The differences between the earths would be a more fascinating subject if Leopold weren’t still a prisoner here.

They’re playing good cop, bad cop. A laughable ploy. 

He and Ophelia used to play this game. Back then, it was more bad cop, worse cop. 

The first time they tortured a man together was a fond memory of his, followed by what happened immediately after - pulling at her clothes with bloody hands while they - 

“Fitz.” 

“It’s Doctor Fitz,” he corrects, as it has become second nature by this point.

“Doctor Fitz,” Coulson is the only one that gives him the courtesy of the title. “Simmons said you wanted to make a deal.” 

Hope flutters in his chest.

Just for a brief moment.

A foolish sort of thing. 

His father would be ashamed of him if he - 

“I want to go home, and you seem to want  _ something  _ out of me,” Leopold replies, “Otherwise you wouldn’t be keeping me alive here. You can’t all be as delusional as Si-  _ Her _ . So why don’t we find a way to compromise?” 

The two agents glance at each other for a moment. 

Classic technique.

Buying time. 

“Tell us what you know about the Framework.” 

_ The Framework _ .

He’s heard Simmons mention it before, but it means nothing to him. He’s never heard the word on his earth. Perhaps it was something similar to Project: Looking Glass? How they made it to his earth?

Still, he has always been a well trained lair.

One does not grow up under the hand of Alistair Fitz without learning how to lie.

One does not spend years as a Hydra sleeper agent without being proficient at lying.

One does not get into the bed with the head of Hydra without knowing when to tell a lie.

“Promise me passage back to my earth, and I’ll tell you everything I know about the Framework.”

Apparently, SHIELD does not have the same lessons on lying, or perhaps they just are deluded by their own morality. 

“We can’t let you leave,” Coulson says. “There’s nowhere for you to go back to.” 

This again. 

“Then I have nothing to say to either of you,” he replies, turning his back of the transparent border separating them. It’s all he can do to make it clear he’s done with their conversation. 

He almost turns back, when May finally speaks, having seen through him from the beginning. “He doesn’t know anything. AIDA must not have trusted him with the truth.” 

Though that doesn’t stop him for angrily muttering, “Her name is Ophelia.” 

 

*

 

He demands to see her over and over again, not to hurt Simmons, though that is an added bonus, but because he needs to know that she is okay. A part of him, the part that is not angry, the part that is no inconvenience by being a prisoner, is in a constant state of worry.

Worrying had always been his weakness.

His hands would shake back at the academy whenever he had to present. Even as a head of Hydra, he constantly had to bite down the bile that rose up in his throat each time a new project was tested. 

Though most of his worry was for her  _ Ophelia _ . 

“Tell me that she’s okay,” Leopold asks, all but begs.

What a reversal it was to be the one that begs. 

He’s disappointed in himself, disappointed in this womanly weakness, a weakness that he spent so long trying to remove from himself. A weakness that comes back here of all places, at the mercy of SHIELD, in front of  _ this  _ woman. 

“If your men have hurt her-” He doesn’t know what he will do. Has no way to make threats while stuck on this side of the glass but he meets the sad eyes of poor Agent Simmons, and asks, “You loved your earth’s version of me, didn’t you?”

“Yes,” she insists desperately, “Yes, I love you. And you love me-”

“No, I love Ophelia. You know that,” he cuts her off. “But if that man was anything like me, then you know, how far I will go for someone I love.”

“You crossed the universe for me.” 

“I crossed the universe for  _ her _ ,” he corrects, gesturing to the cell that he is currently trapped in as proof of that.  “And now, I need to know that she’s safe.”

Simmons doesn’t say anything after that. She rubs the tears away from her eyes and leaves. 

He tries not to let it get to him. Not to let the worry increase, the thought that the reason they refused to answer his question was that it was too late. That it was -

“I’ll kill you all,” he yells, knowing the security cameras will hear him, even if Simmons is gone. “If you’ve hurt her, I’ll burn this goddamned world to the ground!”

 

*

 

The stretch between his last visit and his next one seems to go on longer than usual. He has no way of knowing the days, the meals they give him through a panel in the wall do not come often or consistently enough to help him keep track. 

He thinks that that is perhaps the point. 

Only his daily visits from Simmons kept things straight. 

It is not that he wants to see her, not that he waits for it, but a noise similar to relief falls from his lips when he sees her coming down the stairs into his prison would give one the impression that he might.

His sarcasm is not a strong as it usually is when he greets her, “I thought you’d forgotten about me.” 

“I was away on a mission, they needed someone with knowledge of alien flora and I’m decently proficient in that regard,” she sounds apologetic. 

As if not coming to  _ interrogate  _ him was something she felt guilty about. 

As if he might have been lonely in her absence. 

He wasn’t, no, not at all. 

Leopold can’t help but be curious, the scientist in him winning out ever so briefly, “Alien flora?”

She nods her head. “It wasn’t that exciting.” 

“It sounds exciting,” he prompts her. 

“There was a small  _ incident  _ in Missouri, took out half a small town,” Simmons explains, “It’s really not that fascinating just the usual SHIELD business, honestly I’ve missed these sorts of things.” 

It hits him that he has too. 

Though what he missed was being able to take things apart - inhumans, alien technology, enemy plans. 

He tells himself that is why he’s asking for the details of her mission, instead of aiming to hurt her again, “How exactly did a plant take out a small town?” 

 

*

 

She’s aesthetically pleasing. 

He will give her that. 

He could see why the earth’s version of him might have found her attractive.

She’s softer than his Ophelia, but still beautiful. With a wide and trusting face that makes her seem innocent. 

Sometimes when he is in a particular mood he will listen to her stories as she attempts to _cure him_ with the _power of love_ and try to imagine it. 

Try to imagine the Leopold Fitz that sat next to her at the academy instead of Ophelia. 

Who was a fool that remained loyal to SHIELD. 

Who was weak and emotional and insufficient. 

Who joined a team of misfits. 

Who loved this woman above all else. 

Who was dead erased by his arrival in this world.

A weak fool though one he supposed with half decent taste.  

(She’s even pretty when she cries.) 

 

*

 

It’s a plan. 

A small one.

One inspired by days of listening to stories that were supposed to mean something to him. All of that Hydra training finally being put to use, he was a scientist first and foremost, but also a spy. A good enough one to make it to the very top of Hydra.

He pushes down his disgust with himself, pushes down the impulse to be better and instead makes his voice shake, shouts out the cameras that he knows are listening into him, the ones he is certain she listens to even when she’s not standing on the other side of his cell wall.  

“Hello? Someone? Anyone? What’s going on?” 

Confusion is a good part to play.

The confused and weak  _ Fitz  _ that they are waiting for, suddenly coming back to them. 

The bait works. He has no certainty of the passing of time, but she appears sooner rather than later.

A lab coat swishing around her as she impatiently takes the stairs two at a time, hope in those eyes that are almost familiar now, a flush to her cheeks from having ran the whole way. 

Cute.

Naive.

Foolish. 

“Fitz? Oh please-”

“Jemma,” he says her name for the first time, pushing all of his desperation into it, like he would say  _ Ophelia _ . “Jemma what’s going on?”

She’s there on the other side, close enough, he makes himself hurry to her, stopping when the wall flares up to hold him back and acting as though this is the first time the wall has ever stopped him. 

“Jemma?” 

She gasps at the sound of her name again, hands coming up to cover her mouth, crying again but not for the usual reasons. 

He almost feels bad. 

_ Almost.  _

“Don’t worry, I’ll get you out of there,” she says, between half sob noises. 

Foolish was most certainly it. 

His Ophelia would have been this easily tricked, she would have demanded information of him, demanded proof that he was hers. Simmons falls short in that regard, something which works to his advantage. 

Being able to cross that border, not to have a wall come up to stop him, is such an instantaneous relief. 

Freedom a glorious thing.

Getting pulled into a hug by someone he does not love, barely even tolerates is not nearly as glorious, but he suffers through it. Doesn’t allow himself to grimace for fear of the cameras catching his expression and instead hugs her back. 

She is warm, comforting. 

So different from - 

“Oh Fitz, I’m so glad you’re back, everyone was worried that you wouldn’t come back, but I knew! I knew you were in there that it was just a matter of time.”

“I’ll always come back to you, Jemma, you know this,” he says words he’s said before to someone else, pretending that they are words meant for her ears, “I’d cross the universe for you.” 

Another sob, a happy one. 

Sentiment wetting the shoulder of his shirt. 

A weakness. 

“Let’s get you out of here,” she says, pulling back to rub at her eyes.

And Leopold tries not to let his whole face light up as his plan falls neatly into place. 

The plan does not stay in place so easily. 

They make it up the stairs, outside of his cell (Vault D, he notes for later), and down the hallway before someone stops them. 

Agent Skye, or this world’s version of her.

The inhuman freak. 

A monster wearing the face of someone who had been almost a friend, if nothing else a loyal agent of Hydra.

A monster that threw the woman he loved twenty stories out of a building. 

Suddenly it gets harder to maintain the illusion of the sweet innocent Fitz.

He curls his fingers inward, presses his nails into his palm as a self inflicted punishment and breathes in and out. He can remain in control. He will remain in control. 

Simmons is beside him, insisting over and over again that everything is fine now, that he’s back, and Leopold can’t let this chance slip past him.

“Yes, it’s me. Really, Skye, you-”

“What did you just call me?”

It’s just a second, long enough to slip up to allow the disgust to cross his face, and he can see clearly the second she goes from cautiously hopeful to the fighter she’s proven herself to be.

This time the only person he feels disappointed in is himself. 

“Daisy, he’s just confused.”

“He’s not confused,” Skye - Daisy, here, he’d have to remember that - snaps, “He’s the Doctor.”

At least someone remembered his title. 

He drops the sweet innocent act a second later, holds up his hands in a faux innocent manner. Though his face is no longer that of an innocent man, it’s so easy to shed the skin of that  _ fool Fitz _ . 

“Well, fuck.” 

It’s not much of a fight, he’s weakened from being held prisoner for weeks, and having not had the willpower to train his body instead of just his mind. She’s an inhuman on top of that, a freak, with the powers to stop him before he even gets close enough to hurt her. 

He gets one good punch in, before he’s slammed up against the wall.

The worst feeling is knowing that he won’t get this chance again, that they’ll no doubt increase his security, restrict the time he gets to talk to Simmons. 

That last one feels most disappointing of all, strangely enough. 

Instead of letting himself get caught up in this disappointment of sentiment, he struggles against Skye doppelganger's hold, snarling out, “I will kill you and everyone you love!”

 

*

 

He’s entirely shocked that Simmons is allowed to visit him at all after that, but after a few days of visits only by Coulson or May, she appears again, looking sadder and smaller than before, with  _ Daisy  _ trailing behind her like a bodyguard. Daisy’s got a black eye and for a moment he feels a burst of pride, because he did that. 

“I hope you’re not expecting some sort of apology,” he says, using sarcasm as his safety net, because a part of him, an incredibly small part, wanted to apologize. He refuses to acknowledge that part.

Simmons doesn’t flinch. 

She doesn’t cry.

She just looks at him with a face that’s so disappointed.

Not the first time someone has looked at him that way. Surely not the last. 

Yet, why then, does it feel almost painful when she asks, “How could you do that to me?”

“You seem to still be under the delusion that I care about you.”

 

*

 

The worst part by far of any of the visits - not  _ interrogations _ , he’s long since given up calling them that - is not the sobbing, or the stories of the version of him from this universe, or the way he almost sort of longs for these meetings. 

No, the worst part is listening to Simmons speaking in hopeful tones as she still foolishly believes she can bring a dead man back to life. 

His condescension has long since turned to something more like pity.

“We’re working on a plan to get the real you back,” Simmons says. She’s more reserved now, softer spoken. “This would be easy if I had an engineer by my side but, Daisy and I have made decent work of AIDA’s coding and comparing it to your brain scans. If all goes well we should have the real you back by the end of the month.”

“This is the real me,” he insists, yet again. “It’s just like when the two of you stepped into my world and replaced the versions of you there. Project: Looking Glass had the same intention. To travel worlds you must replace the version of you that existed there, to maintain a stable balance.” 

“That’s not how-”

“It is,” he cuts her off. “Ophelia and I studied this for years, it our whole focus at the academy, and as we moved up the ranks of Hydra, was crossing into parallel earths. Something which I have clearly mastered.”

It is Daisy that speaks this time, “So she was manipulating you from the very beginning.” 

He refuses to rise to the bait. 

He’s not entirely unconvinced that the  whole point of Daisy being here isn’t to try and set him off. 

She would have made a good Hydra agent - Skye, certainly had. 

Instead he says, “It’s not my fault you don’t understand the intricacies of the multiverse.” 

Daisy snorts dismissively at him. 

It has been getting more and more difficult to ignore her, for all that fact that she was supposed to be Simmons’ inhuman bodyguard. 

Disgusting.  

“Please, enlighten me. What is so funny,” he says sarcastically, waving a hand in her direction. 

“The Framework wasn’t real. It was a computer program,” Daisy insists, “One AIDA deleted the second she knew we were onto her.”

“Her name is Ophelia-”

“No,” this time it is Simmons that cuts him off, somehow regaining some of her confidence. He would have admired that sudden burst of something if it wasn’t for the next words out of her mouth. “Her name is AIDA, the A is for artificial-”

“Fuck off,” he snaps cutting her off. 

It’s the same thing that man had said on the island with a woman that looked just like his Ophelia. With Resistance agents firing about, traitors on his own team being revealed, and the scream from a woman that for a second had sounded familiar causing doubts to fill his mind.

Doubts which led him to tracking down the subverses instead of being with Ophelia when she crossed to the other side. 

Doubts which caused him to be stuck here on another earth without a solid plan. 

Doubt which still linger in the back of his mind. 

He suddenly can’t do this anymore.

“Maybe your world isn’t the real one.”

 

*

 

Daisy coming without Simmons is a surprise. 

Not a pleasant one.

Inhumans have always made him uncomfortable, which was why it had been so much easier to take them apart then try to work with them. A necessary action for the greater good. Purging the world of those unnatural, those who meant to cause them harm.

“To what do I owe the pleasure,” he says none too kindly, walking over towards the transparent border to greet her.

“I’ve got a gift for you.” 

“A gift,” he repeats with sudden growing suspicion, now very much aware of the burlap sack she’s brought with her. 

It’s just about the right size to be - 

No.

A part of him knew. 

A part of him at least suspected. 

That there was no way they would keep both of them alive. Not after everything Ophelia had told him about this world.

And yet he had hoped foolishly above all else that they could still make it out of this, that the two of them could find a way back to their world where everything was so much easier instead of - 

He’s shaking. 

He barely realizes he’s shaking at first, so close to breaking, wanting to hurt something but also wanting so desperately to just stop existing. 

It feel like he’s the one that died not - 

He had always said if they hurt her that he would kill them all and he wants to, a very large part of him wants to, but there’s so much more. The same fear he had felt when he’d been told she’d been tossed out of a window, sitting by her beside willing her to wake up and come back to him.

There had been plans. A wedding ring hidden at the beach house. Plans that had been put on hold by her need to get to this world, but plans that he one day intended to come back to. To build a family together, to live as happily ever after as two heads of Hydra could. 

That would never happen now. 

He was trapped here and Ophelia was dead, a severed head dropped just out of his reach as proof and for how long -  

How long had he been trapped here with all of them knowing? 

It hits him suddenly that she had known the whole time and never said anything. 

 

*

 

He never wanted to come to this world. 

Now, he was trapped here. 

He refuses to get up from the small bed in his cell the next time someone comes to visit, or the time after that, or the time after that. 

 

*

 

He’d gotten angry at first, thrown everything not screwed down in his cell, which wasn’t much, screamed and made promises to murder that he didn’t intend to keep. 

Then something else had set in.

A quiet dread. 

His father would have called it weakness, but his father was dead.

Everyone he cared about was dead.

And if he was to believe what they had told him, his whole earth was gone too. 

“Fitz,” Simmons still visits him, despite his unwillingness to engage with anyone anymore, “Please, Fitz, you have to eat.” 

His voice is rough from disuse when he does speak, days of silence will do that to a person, “You’ll find that I actually don’t have to.” 

“If you don’t eat you’ll die.” 

“Maybe that’s the point?”

“Fitz-”

“Why won’t you people just kill me already,” he asks, the one question that’s been plaguing him. “And don’t tell me it’s because you believe you can bring back a dead man through the power of love, because Miss Simmons that’s impossible.”

“It’s Doctor,” he corrects him with a tone that is almost fond.

Everything hurts but for a second there is something other than pain inside of him. 

Fond and familiar. 

Teasing, like a joke just between the two of them. 

When Simmons speaks again it is with the same tone, “I’m sorry for what Daisy did, I told her not to but she did, and that wasn’t fair to you. She said it was payback for when you… But that doesn’t mean that I....”

“No, it’s-” His next words are choked off, and he hates himself for the fact that it’s harder to hold himself together. To maintain the composure that had been drilled into him since he was a little boy. 

It all falls apart so easily.

He doesn’t like to cry. 

Crying usually ended with a firm hand reminding him that crying was a weakness or a disappointed look from a woman whose face showed so little other emotions.

But he can’t stop it now. 

He feels like he’s drowning, though he had no idea why the feeling of  _ drowning  _ is a familiar one. 

The sound of the cell wall being dropped is one he entirely misses until there’s weight on the other side of his cell bed, and a gentle voice reassuring him, “It’s okay to be upset, I’m here.” 

She’s close enough to fight her, to fulfill all those angry words he had shouted for anyone and everyone to hear. He’s trained well enough, could snap her neck in a second, even in his weakened state.

But he doesn’t.

Hurting her is the last thing he wants to do. 

“Being upset is normal,” she tries again, then for the first time says his name truly, “Leopold, it’s okay.” 

That is what does it. What breaks his last hold on his fragile psyche. 

This isn’t the first time he hugged her, the first was when he was playing the part of someone else, trying to make a break for it - but as he moves into her offered arms it feel like the first time. 

Hands rubbing softly on his back, a comfort that he’s never had before, never knew to crave. 

This time he’s the one crying into her shoulder.  

 

*

 

They don’t talk about it the next time she comes to visit.

He’s still not eating. Still slowly killing himself in the only way he has left to. Still avoiding the sad look in her eyes. 

But he calls her  _ Doctor Simmons  _ out of a courtesy and she calls him  _ Doctor Fitz _ and it feels like it should mean something. 

It hits him here, listening to her explain how in the next twenty-four hours they will be finished with the procedure that they believe will bring the Leopold Fitz of their world back to life, that the hollow empty feeling isn’t the only one taking up space in his chest. 

He’s going to die.

Either by his own hand or by their experiments. 

Everyone he loves is dead, and he can’t go back to his world, and he’s accepted that. 

But that doesn’t account for the other feeling, the one that isn’t love, is barely even  _ like _ , but it’s something almost fond and -

“I’m going to miss our conversations, Doctor Simmons.” 

She stops in the middle of whatever she had been explaining, to meet his gaze with eyes that he can imagine another version of himself having fallen in love with. 

“Me too.” 

 

 

 

 

 


End file.
